Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Loser Takes All
    Loser Takes All
    Loser Takes All
    Ebook108 pages1 hour

    Loser Takes All

    By Graham Greene

    3/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    A Monte Carlo honeymoon becomes a gamble in Graham Greene’s “superbly well told” comedy of love, marriage, and risk (J. B. Priestley).
     
    A modest London accountant on a budget, Mr. Bertram has settled on a honeymoon at the seaside resort of Bournemouth with his fiancée, Cary. However, Bertram’s boss, the solicitous Herbert Dreuther, won’t hear of anything so common. Bertram and Cary are to be married in Monte Carlo, after which they’ll be Dreuther’s guests on his private yacht and sail down the coast of Italy. It sounds too lovely to be true. And surely Bertram can afford one night at the Hôtel de Paris. But when the absentminded Dreuther fails to show, and days turn into weeks, Bertram and Cary find themselves well beyond their means. Unable to check out, trapped in luxury, and with nowhere to turn but the casino, Bertram has a plan—and absolutely no idea what there is left to lose.
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateMay 15, 2018
    ISBN9781504053990
    Loser Takes All
    Author

    Graham Greene

    Graham Greene (1904–1991) is recognized as one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, achieving both literary acclaim and popular success. His best known works include Brighton Rock, The Heart of the Matter, The Quiet American, and The Power and the Glory. After leaving Oxford, Greene first pursued a career in journalism before dedicating himself full-time to writing with his first big success, Stamboul Train. He became involved in screenwriting and wrote adaptations for the cinema as well as original screenplays, the most successful being The Third Man. Religious, moral, and political themes are at the root of much of his work, and throughout his life he traveled to some of the wildest and most volatile parts of the world, which provided settings for his fiction. Greene was a member of the Order of Merit and a Companion of Honour.  

    Read more from Graham Greene

    Related to Loser Takes All

    Related ebooks

    Literary Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Will There Ever Be Another Writer Like Philip Roth?

      May 23, 2018

      I first discovered Philip Roth at age fifteen. My parents, bless them, placed Goodbye, Columbus in my hands. Having grown up in the suburbs of Detroit—the rock-ribbed WASP enclave of Grosse Pointe—I found him exotic, thrilling. His audacity staggered

      2 min read

    • Article

      A Summer Party

      Jun 8, 2021

      Rosemary looked over the party; her parents and her parents’ friends down below on the sod lawn. Seersucker and espadrilles; white cotton dresses; Brazilian jazz; the costumes of their heyday. They drank beer and Long Island iced tea and white wine p

      10 min read

    • Article

      A Christmas Memory

      Nov 1, 2018

      A Christmas Memory
      18 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems by Charles Baudelaire

      Jun 9, 2020

      After my friend and I left the tobacco shop, he carefully sorted his loose change; slipped some small gold coins in his left jacket pocket; into the right went the silver pieces; in his left pants pocket, a handful of centimes; and in the right, a si

      2 min read

    • Article

      How not TO RELAX

      Apr 10, 2024

      ‘What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare?’ wrote a chap called William H. Davies, the poet laureate of the duvet day. He coined those words in 1911, which was clearly a more relaxed age. I’d like to see Mr Davies attemp

      3 min read

    • Article

      Two-Stroke Toilets: The trouble with time travel.

      May 8, 2014

      What’s this?” I said, looking down at the change the old woman had put down on the counter between us. There were bills of the wrong size and color, clunky-seeming coins that were too big and too dull. I stirred a finger in the little pile. She glanc

      31 min read

    • Article

      A summons FROM AUNTIE

      Jan 25, 2023

      ‘I know a fat old policeman, he’s always on our street,’ sang Mr Dear at the top of what I suppose we must call his voice. ‘A large and jolly red-faced man, he really is a treat.’ Then, suddenly, the only sounds were the gentle hum of the engine, th

      3 min read

    • Article

      Hitting the WRONG NOTE

      Aug 16, 2023

      It is Sunday morning at Chateau Dear, and I am sitting at the kitchen table with many bits of paper and a pocket calculator. I am trying to make sense of the Ladies’ Cricket Club accounts, for which I was volunteered on the grounds that Mr Dear is th

      3 min read

    • Article

      FOGO versus FOMO

      Mar 8, 2023

      FOGO versus FOMO
      6 min read

    • Article

      Chartwell Memories

      Nov 22, 2017

      Chartwell Memories
      5 min read

    • Article

      Daughter’s DILEMMA

      Dec 29, 2021

      Daughter’s DILEMMA
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Courage To Be Happy

      Feb 1, 2023

      MARRIAGE and columns have this in common: you tend to repeat yourself. More than once in these pages, I have quoted the New Yorker’s legendary film critic Pauline Kael. After President Nixon’s landslide victory in 1972 she wrote: ‘I live in a rather

      3 min read

    • Article

      Maggie's Tip For First-time Buyers

      Jul 26, 2023

      Not long before her departure from the political scene, I was invited to a Christmas lunch at Lord McAlpine’s country house, where Mrs Thatcher and Denis were the main guests. We were 12 in all: an odd mix, including Terence Donovan, Mrs T’s favourit

      3 min read

    • Article

      Letterbocks

      Apr 14, 2022

      letters@viz.co.uk □ “OUR HOUSE, in the middle of the street,” sang popular North London ska band Madness in the eighties. But I can’t imagine they were particularly popular with local residents if they had a house blocking the middle of the road. If

      9 min read

    • Article

      The Art Of Conversation

      Nov 1, 2023

      The Art Of Conversation
      4 min read

    • Article

      Hell Is Other People At Breakfast

      Sep 20, 2023

      Thanks to the miracle of tech, my wife can send me regular updates of her participation in a house party in a fishing lodge in Scotland. Amazingly, not just photographs but short film clips are transmitted almost in real time, showing what my father

      3 min read

    • Article

      THREE’S A Crowd

      Feb 19, 2020

      “There are times when I wonder whether this page should contain a health warning for those of a delicate disposition. You might be flicking through Woman’s Weekly in the doctor’s waiting room, and a sudden onset of high blood pressure or a racing pul

      3 min read

    • Article

      LeTteR Bocks

      Aug 4, 2022

      ◻PLEASE find attached this trademark from a box of eggs, which appears to show a chicken lifting its leg to crack off an eggy one. Susan Butcher, Australia ◻FORMER Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been criticised for meeting an ex-KGB agent without h

      13 min read

    • Article

      When Lizzie met Maggie

      Dec 13, 2023

      The Grim Reaper has been having a high old time of late. I've barely had a moment to keep up with my diary, I have been so busy writing letters of condolence, attending funerals and giving addresses at memorial services. I was especially saddened by

      3 min read

    • Article

      The ACCUSED

      Aug 9, 2023

      You would think that decades of watching detective dramas on television had taught Mr Dear something, would you not? I am thinking particularly of the bit where a shot rings out and somebody dashes into the master bedroom, where they find the first c

      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Loser Takes All

    3/5

    73 ratings7 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 2/5
      I certainly liked the story, although it didn't take me very long to read - an hour during the afternoon one day, and then another one at night. Really, this should have been "Loser Takes All and other stories" and then grouped in with some of Greene's other writing.I was worried at the beginning - the GOM, around whom the plot events seemingly revolve, was drawn with such broad strokes as to make him seem jokingly one-dimensional. I was particularly glad to see Greene humanise him; I found the love story between the narrator and his young wife also very touching, if not as powerful as many of the other romances Greene has introduced me to.
    • 4/5
      I think this was the shortest Graham Greene work I've read after The Fallen Idol but I did enjoy it more than The Third Man, if only barely. Even though there isn't much depth to the characters, they're still enjoyable to read about.
    • 4/5
      A decently crafted little moral story about an assistant accountant whose life is overturned by a sequence of happenings that begins with the ostensible kindness of a god-like senior partner in offering to host his wedding in Monaco instead of Maida Vale. Left on their own, the couple initially cope with misfortune and impending poverty, are rescued at a critical moment, and when casino winnings reach a heretofore unattainable level of wealth, find the basis of their relationship fundamentally altered for the worse. The crisis comes when Bertram is successful in his last gamble just as the missing senior partner arrives, this time as a caring and benevolent deus ex machina. By throwing away what he has won, Bertram is able to once again win back his wife, fulfilling the prediction in the title.
    • 3/5
      Short novella of love and gambling that has not travelled well - very dated.Read July 2006
    • 3/5
      A moralistic novella on the dangers of what happens when a “get rich quick” scheme actually works. The style is very much a product of its time (1955) and while it’s at times witty and well observed none of the characters are particularly likeable and I had no real sympathy for their fate good or bad.
    • 2/5
      An utterly romantic novelette with too many cardboard characters to even entertain. Both plot and protagonist are severely cliché-ridden. Apart from the usual striking sentence or two, there is not much here to attract the discerning reader. Especially the people that visit the casino are straight from the cliché book, while the young woman that will love her new husband only if he stays (relatively) poor is totally unconvincing without any background information on her state of mind. Could be the least interesting piece of Greene prose I have ever read. Stick to Brighton Rock, instead.
    • 3/5
      I SUPPOSE the small greenish statue of a man in a wig on a horse is one of the famous statues of the world. I said to Cary, ‘Do you see how shiny the right knee is? It’s been touched so often for luck, like St Peter’s foot in Rome.’
      She rubbed the knee carefully and tenderly as though she were polishing it.
      ‘Are you superstitious?’ I said. ‘
      Yes.’
      ‘I’m not.’
      ‘I’m so superstitious I never walk under ladders. I throw salt over my right shoulder. I try not to tread on the cracks in pavements. Darling, you’re marrying the most superstitious woman in the world. Lots of people aren’t happy. We are. I’m not going to risk a thing.’

      There is not much I can say about Loser Takes All other than it is a delightful story of a newlywed couple on honeymoon. I have heard Loser Takes All being compared to Coward's Private Lives and just for once I have to admit that this comparison also came to my mind when reading Greene's story.
      However, where wit and humor and sheer slapstick in Private Lives shows a couple (or two) that is very sure of itself, Greene's approach is different: His story is based on a couple who isn't sure of anything at all, and in the course of the book, this uncertainty keeps the story interesting.

      "ONE adapts oneself to money much more easily than to poverty: Rousseau might have written that man was born rich and is everywhere impoverished."

    Book preview

    Loser Takes All - Graham Greene

    PART ONE

    1

    I suppose the small greenish statue of a man in a wig on a horse is one of the famous statues of the world. I said to Cary, ‘Do you see how shiny the right knee is? It’s been touched so often for luck, like St Peter’s foot in Rome.’

    She rubbed the knee carefully and tenderly as though she were polishing it. ‘Are you superstitious?’ I said.

    ‘Yes.’

    ‘I’m not.’

    ‘I’m so superstitious I never walk under ladders. I throw salt over my right shoulder. I try not to tread on the cracks in pavements. Darling, you’re marrying the most superstitious woman in the world. Lots of people aren’t happy. We are. I’m not going to risk a thing.’

    ‘You’ve rubbed that knee so much, we ought to have plenty of luck at the tables.’

    ‘I wasn’t asking for luck at the tables,’ she said.

    2

    That night I thought that our luck had begun in London two weeks before. We were to be married at St Luke’s Church, Maida Hill, and we were going to Bournemouth for the honeymoon. Not, on the face of it, an exhilarating programme, but I thought I didn’t care a damn where we went so long as Cary was there. Le Touquet was within our means, but we thought we could be more alone in Bournemouth—the Ramages and the Truefitts were going to Le Touquet. ‘Besides, you’d lose all our money at the Casino,’ Cary said, ‘and we’d have to come home.’

    ‘I know too much about figures. I live with them all day.’

    ‘You won’t be bored at Bournemouth?’

    ‘No. I won’t be bored.’

    ‘I wish it wasn’t your second honeymoon. Was the first very exciting—in Paris?’

    ‘We could only afford a week-end,’ I said guardedly.

    ‘Did you love her a terrible lot?’

    ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘It was more than fifteen years ago. You hadn’t started school. I couldn’t have waited all that time for you.’

    ‘But did you?’

    ‘The night after she left me I took Ramage out to dinner and stood him the best champagne I could get. Then I went home and slept for nine hours right across the bed. She was one of those people who kick at night and then say you are taking up too much room.’

    ‘Perhaps I’ll kick.’

    ‘That would feel quite different. I hope you’ll kick. Then I’ll know you are there. Do you realize the terrible amount of time we’ll waste asleep, not knowing a thing? A quarter of our life.’

    It took her a long time to calculate that. She wasn’t good at figures as I was. ‘More,’ she said, ‘much more. I like ten hours.’

    ‘That’s even worse,’ I said. ‘And eight hours at the office without you. And food—this awful business of having meals.’

    ‘I’ll try to kick,’ she said.

    That was at lunch-time the day when our so-called luck started. We used to meet as often as we could for a snack at the Volunteer which was just round the corner from my office—Cary drank cider and had an unquenchable appetite for cold sausages. I’ve seen her eat five and then finish off with a hard-boiled egg.

    ‘If we were rich,’ I said, ‘you wouldn’t have to waste time cooking.’

    ‘But think how much more time we’d waste eating. These sausages—look, I’m through already. We shouldn’t even have finished the caviare.’

    ‘And then the sole meunière,’ I said.

    ‘A little fried spring chicken with new peas.’

    ‘A soufflé Rothschild.’

    ‘Oh, don’t be rich, please,’ she said. ‘We mightn’t like each other if we were rich. Like me growing fat and my hair falling out …’

    ‘That wouldn’t make any difference.’

    ‘Oh yes, it would,’ she said. ‘You know it would,’ and the talk suddenly faded out. She was not too young to be wise, but she was too young to know that wisdom shouldn’t be spoken aloud when you are happy.

    I went back to the huge office block with its glass, glass, glass, and its dazzling marble floor and its pieces of modern carving in alcoves and niches like statues in a Catholic church. I was the assistant accountant (an ageing assistant accountant) and the very vastness of the place made promotion seem next to impossible. To be raised from the ground floor I would have to be a piece of sculpture myself.

    In little uncomfortable offices in the city people die and people move on: old gentlemen look up from steel boxes and take a Dickensian interest in younger men. Here, in the great operational room with the computers ticking and the tape machines clicking and the soundless typewriters padding, you felt there was no chance for a man who hadn’t passed staff college. I hadn’t time to sit down before a loudspeaker said, ‘Mr Bertram wanted in Room 10.’ (That was me.)

    ‘Who lives in Room 10?’ I asked.

    Nobody knew. Somebody said, ‘It must be on the eighth floor.’ (He spoke with awe as though he were referring to the peak of Everest—the eighth floor was as far as the London County Council regulations in those days allowed us to build towards Heaven.)

    ‘Who lives in Room 10?’ I asked the liftman again.

    ‘Don’t you know?’ he said sourly. ‘How long have you been here?’

    ‘Five years.’

    We began to mount. He said, ‘You ought to know who lives in Room 10.’

    ‘But I don’t.’

    ‘Five years and you don’t know that.’

    ‘Be a good chap and tell me.’

    ‘Here you are. Eighth floor, turn left.’ As I got out, he said gloomily, ‘Not know Room 10!’ He relented as he shut the gates. ‘Who do you think? The Gom, of course.’

    Then I began to walk very slowly indeed.

    I have no belief in luck. I am not superstitious, but it is impossible, when you have reached forty and are conspicuously unsuccessful, not sometimes to half-believe in a malign providence. I had never met the Gom: I had only seen him twice; there was no reason so far as I could tell why I should ever see him again. He was elderly; he would die first, I would contribute grudgingly to a memorial. But to be summoned from the ground floor to the eighth shook me. I wondered what terrible mistake could justify a reprimand in Room 10; it seemed to be quite possible that our wedding now would never take place at St Luke’s, nor our fortnight at Bournemouth. In a way I was right.

    3

    The Gom was called the Gom by those who disliked him and by all those too far removed from him for any feeling at all. He was like the weather—unpredictable. When a new tape machine was installed, or new computers replaced the old reliable familiar ones, you said, ‘The Gom, I suppose,’ before settling down to learn the latest toy. At Christmas little typewritten notes came round, addressed personally to each member of the staff (it must have given the typing pool a day’s work, but the signature below the seasonal greeting, Herbert Dreuther, was rubber stamped). I was always a little surprised that the letter was not signed Gom. At that season of bonuses and cigars, unpredictable in amount, you sometimes heard him called by his full name, the Grand Old Man.

    And there was something grand about him with his mane

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1